UK 'screw up' allegation rejected

Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has rejected accusations the British "screwed up" over a Taliban attack in which two US Marines were killed and eight American Harrier jump jets were destroyed.

PUBLISHED: 19:22, Wed, Oct 9, 2013

Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has rejected claims the UK 'screwed up' in a Taliban attack that killed US servicemen. [PA]

Giving evidence to the Commons Defence Committee, Mr Hammond insisted the Americans had not sought to blame Britain for the attack last year on Camp Bastion - the main British base in Afghanistan.

Two US generals were forced to retire after the release last month of the official US report into the incident which saw 15 Taliban fighters dressed in American uniforms walk past an unmanned watchtower onto the airfield and open fire with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

Papers released with the report showed US officers complained the British had refused to pay for a new security fence following an earlier attempted suicide attack on the runway where a plane carrying US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta had just landed.

In a statement to the inquiry, Major General Gregg Sturdevant - one of the Marine Corps officers forced to retire - said the British "knew that they had screwed up".

Mr Hammond however told the committee that the Americans were not trying to hold Britain responsible for what happened.

"That is not our interpretation of the report and that is not the message we are getting from the US," he said.

"If the conclusion of the report was that it was our fault, it isn't obvious why two US Marine generals would get fired as a consequence."

"Our understanding of the incident at the moment on the basis of our own review and on the basis of the published version of the US report is that we do not believe that there is a systemic UK failure that we need to address.

"I have asked the question whether we have probed on our military-to-military networks US counterparts as to whether there is any hint of blame being cast in our direction and I am told there is no hint in the military-to-military conversations that we should be looking at our operations."

Mr Hammond said the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Houghton, would conduct his own review of the American findings once the full, unredacted version of the report had been received from the US.

One of the issues he will be looking at is whether British commanders properly reported any concerns they had about security at the base through the UK chain of command.

Unlike the US report, however, Mr Hammond said that Gen Houghton's review would not be made public.

"This is a review that has been conducted by another nation about incident the consequences of which were primarily borne that nation," he said.

"I don't seen a process that would lead to a public review of a US report by a UK agency."

His refusal to release the review was sharply criticised by some MPs on the committee. The chairman, Conservative MP James Arbuthnot, said: " If you learn lessons from something, it is probably best to make those lessons public."

Mr Hammond said work on the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review had got under way "as soon as the dust had settled" after the last shake-up and options were beginning to be debated in the MoD now.

He said the next review would need to consider the money available at the same time as assessing what capability was needed.

"It's a little bit like saying to a man outside a car showroom 'Decide which car you like and then we'll look at the budget afterwards'," he told the committee.

"It doesn't make any sense to go into the Ferrari showroom if you have only got a budget for a Volkswagen.

"You have got to do the both together to be doing anything sensible and useful so I would expect us to address the two issues in tandem."

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